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I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going an

by echelon 7mo ago

I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it. Now they show their true colors. They want to train models on our engineering to replace us, while simultaneously giving nothing back? No thanks. I'd rather fund the shitty US hyperscalers. At least that leads to jobs here. If there's a company willing develop and foster large scale weights in the open, I'll adopt their tooling 100%. It doesn't matter if they're a year behind. Just do it open and build an entire ecosystem on top of it. The re-AOLization of the internet into thin clients is bullshit, and all it takes is one player to buck the rules to topple the whole house of cards.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed weights model from a geopolitical rival. That's a very reasonable stance. It doesn't change the fact that we do have plenty of local models (up to and including Qwen 3.5) that are still quite useful.
cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
Whereas I as a Canadian am absolutely eager to see a serious competitor from a rival to the US because sending money south to Anthropic and OpenAI who think it's ok to spy on (or worse) their non-American customers, and are headquartered in a country that is trying to crush my country's economy, interfere in our domestic politics, and put us out of work and making threats on political allies. I'd prefer them to be open weight, but I'd love to sub a decent competitive coding plan from a European or Chinese provider. Right now they're not quite there. If closing it and charging for it brings them closer to competitive, that's ok. If the US tech and AI industry long term wants customers and a broad market outside of their own domestic base, they need to reconsider who they are bending the knee to, and how they are defining their policies in relation to the Trump administration. Bring on the Chinese competition.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  China (meaning the Chinese government specifically, not the people of course) is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the developed West in general including Canada and Europe, not just the U.S. I don't exactly like this and would certainly prefer that this wasn't the case, but we can't exactly ignore the facts. This matters when we choose whom to rely on for things like certain hosted third-party services, including AI inference. GP's stance actually makes a lot of sense from this POV, even though it's just as true that many Chinese folks are doing wonderful work on open-weight local AI.
  - Filligree 7mo ago
    China has never threatened war against my country; America has. Between the two, it’s clearly safer to lean towards the Chinese options if EU ones aren’t available.
    - andsoitis 7mo ago
      That’s incredibly naïve.
      - NonHyloMorph 7mo ago
        How so?
      - 3acctforcom 7mo ago
        Meh, people have their own interests and values. And you can't force people to spend money no matter how much you may disagree with them Bring on the Chinese, fuck the Americans.
        cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
        Americans hating on the Chinese for doing to them what they did to the rest of the world for 50 years. Just without the bombs part.
      - 7mo ago
evilduck 7mo ago
This is not even the first closed weights Qwen model.
Zetaphor 7mo ago
> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it. Qwen is not the only Chinese lab, and the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source. Allegedly Qwen hasn't either if their recent statements are to be believed. They're just hoping to capture market share with *-claw customers before releasing an open weights version. We'll have to wait and see how before they decide to release that.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What's closer to the truth however is that there's lots of second-rate players in China doing open models, that will be getting a lot more attention from local AI proponents if the big names seriously slow down their AI releases. The local AI scene as a whole is quite healthy.
  - Zetaphor 7mo ago
    > I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What exactly has changed? Alibaba just released a bunch of new models and have said 3.6 weights are coming soon. The others labs have shown no signs of slowing down their releases either. Whatever you're referring to is news to me and likely most others.
benatkin 7mo ago
> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. I'm USian myself, but I don't think the site should be very US-centric.
jhancock 7mo ago
z.ai models are open weights. GLM-5.1 is very close to Opus with obvious exception of session length. Only academic models will be true open source as companies can't legally afford to disclose learning inputs. In regards to "They want to train models on our engineering to replace us". Some software engineers in China can run circles around some of the best teams in Silicon Valley. Days of U.S. hegemony are over. I recommend you make peace and make friends.
muyuu 7mo ago
looking at the other replies I'm not seeing what I consider the most important rebuttal to this argument: there is no real "adopting" in this hybrid open/close space right now, the lock-in is minimal and as much as different corporations are trying to create a lock-in effect by closing down their tools and interfaces, they are not really succeeding I can constantly jump from one provider to another, and to my local servers which are already able to run very useful models at reasonable hardware cost, and I intend to continue doing that for the foreseeable future the one thing I'm not going to do is tying my tooling to one provider or another or getting overtly used to the specifics of a model outside of my control more than the weights or the training, which of course are very important, the real battle right now is for establishing some dependency mechanism so that your users won't just flee en-masse as soon as you inevitably try to abuse your market dominance and lock-in mechanisms, as is customary in everything computing these days - note that i don't explicitly talk about raking up prices, that is just one of the most difficult methods as people are very sensitive to that, when you can sneakily sell user data, get government contracts from never-disclosed conditions, or even just incorporate your intelligence to ad networks in one way or another

by echelon 7mo ago

zozbot234 7mo ago

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed weights model from a geopolitical rival. That's a very reasonable stance. It doesn't change the fact that we do have plenty of local models (up to and including Qwen 3.5) that are still quite useful.

cmrdporcupine 7mo ago

Whereas I as a Canadian am absolutely eager to see a serious competitor from a rival to the US because sending money south to Anthropic and OpenAI who think it's ok to spy on (or worse) their non-American customers, and are headquartered in a country that is trying to crush my country's economy, interfere in our domestic politics, and put us out of work and making threats on political allies. I'd prefer them to be open weight, but I'd love to sub a decent competitive coding plan from a European or Chinese provider. Right now they're not quite there. If closing it and charging for it brings them closer to competitive, that's ok. If the US tech and AI industry long term wants customers and a broad market outside of their own domestic base, they need to reconsider who they are bending the knee to, and how they are defining their policies in relation to the Trump administration. Bring on the Chinese competition.

zozbot234 7mo ago
China (meaning the Chinese government specifically, not the people of course) is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the developed West in general including Canada and Europe, not just the U.S. I don't exactly like this and would certainly prefer that this wasn't the case, but we can't exactly ignore the facts. This matters when we choose whom to rely on for things like certain hosted third-party services, including AI inference. GP's stance actually makes a lot of sense from this POV, even though it's just as true that many Chinese folks are doing wonderful work on open-weight local AI.
- Filligree 7mo ago
  China has never threatened war against my country; America has. Between the two, it’s clearly safer to lean towards the Chinese options if EU ones aren’t available.
  - andsoitis 7mo ago
    That’s incredibly naïve.
    - NonHyloMorph 7mo ago
      How so?
    - 3acctforcom 7mo ago
      Meh, people have their own interests and values. And you can't force people to spend money no matter how much you may disagree with them Bring on the Chinese, fuck the Americans.
      - cmrdporcupine 7mo ago
        Americans hating on the Chinese for doing to them what they did to the rest of the world for 50 years. Just without the bombs part.
    - 7mo ago

evilduck 7mo ago

This is not even the first closed weights Qwen model.

Zetaphor 7mo ago

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. The open source weights argument was the one thing China had going and that I was seriously cheering them on for. They could have been our saviors and disrupted the US tech giants - and if it was open, I'd have welcomed it. Qwen is not the only Chinese lab, and the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source. Allegedly Qwen hasn't either if their recent statements are to be believed. They're just hoping to capture market share with *-claw customers before releasing an open weights version. We'll have to wait and see how before they decide to release that.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> the others have shown no change in their commitment to open source I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What's closer to the truth however is that there's lots of second-rate players in China doing open models, that will be getting a lot more attention from local AI proponents if the big names seriously slow down their AI releases. The local AI scene as a whole is quite healthy.
- Zetaphor 7mo ago
  > I wouldn't call this totally accurate, especially as of late. What exactly has changed? Alibaba just released a bunch of new models and have said 3.6 weights are coming soon. The others labs have shown no signs of slowing down their releases either. Whatever you're referring to is news to me and likely most others.

benatkin 7mo ago

> I'm not interested in adopting an inferior closed source weight from a geopolitical rival. I'm USian myself, but I don't think the site should be very US-centric.

jhancock 7mo ago

z.ai models are open weights. GLM-5.1 is very close to Opus with obvious exception of session length. Only academic models will be true open source as companies can't legally afford to disclose learning inputs. In regards to "They want to train models on our engineering to replace us". Some software engineers in China can run circles around some of the best teams in Silicon Valley. Days of U.S. hegemony are over. I recommend you make peace and make friends.

muyuu 7mo ago

looking at the other replies I'm not seeing what I consider the most important rebuttal to this argument: there is no real "adopting" in this hybrid open/close space right now, the lock-in is minimal and as much as different corporations are trying to create a lock-in effect by closing down their tools and interfaces, they are not really succeeding I can constantly jump from one provider to another, and to my local servers which are already able to run very useful models at reasonable hardware cost, and I intend to continue doing that for the foreseeable future the one thing I'm not going to do is tying my tooling to one provider or another or getting overtly used to the specifics of a model outside of my control more than the weights or the training, which of course are very important, the real battle right now is for establishing some dependency mechanism so that your users won't just flee en-masse as soon as you inevitably try to abuse your market dominance and lock-in mechanisms, as is customary in everything computing these days - note that i don't explicitly talk about raking up prices, that is just one of the most difficult methods as people are very sensitive to that, when you can sneakily sell user data, get government contracts from never-disclosed conditions, or even just incorporate your intelligence to ad networks in one way or another